I was having a bit of a bad night earlier tonight and I was in such a bad mood that, it seems, I eventually decided the only cure would be to wander off into the big massive garage of my house here , where I keep a bunch of paperbacks and hardcover books I constantly tell myself I'll never read again, and -- of all the books available to grab in this massive garage --- I grabbed an old Jack Kerouac one, the Dharma Bums, from 19...57, I believe.
I'm not sure what made me do this of course because usually I avoid Kerouac like the god damn plague and this has especially been the case for, like, the last 12 years or something now. My reasons for avoiding Kerouac are simple and also demented: I relate so much with the guy (working class background and all, plus the momma attachment) that I almost Actually hate him more than I love him. I suppose I open up his books and I see some version of my self that I occasionally wish I was, or had been, but who I now know I'll never be. On the road particularly had that effected on me when I read it back in sophomore year of HS and I've sometimes thought that reading that book actually almost ruined my life---just because it left me yearning for friends, friends who, I'll tell you, I had never yearned for before journeying into that book. In fact, it's the yearning for friends thing that I think is what always gets me with Kerouac, and if you've ever read his books I think you'll understand what I mean, since it seems like literally every last one of them is always about him....and his absolutely incredible friends...having the time of their lives.
On the Road is the quintessential example of this and the Dharma bums released one year later is no different, at least from what I've read so far: it's all about some dude named Japhy that Jack seems obsessed with, and then too all about the "interesting" episodes they have together. It's the style of the episodes I think (which seem to be the same in all his books) that really get me every time, most of all. The reason why is because they are always just so typical. Like, the sort of stuff that people do in Jack Kerouac books, the reason I think so many people find it so touching and simultaneously heartbreaking, is because it's literally shit that almost everybody has done at some point in time.
Honestly, it's always the same sort of run down: the characters drink a little, they tell stupid jokes, they wake up and experience the "mystical dawn", they drink coffee after being up all night, they drive around some useless small town, they sit in diners and comment on locals, they listen to whatever the hip music of the day is, occasionally they have sex, they discuss dreams and goals, et cetera. Nothing too out of the ordinary ever seems to happen, which at first you'd think is a recipe for disaster, but with Kerouac it somehow seems to work --- or at least, once upon a time , did work--- just because even something this simple, all those years ago, was literally something that, for some reason, no one had ever thought to write previously.....
Understanding Jack Kerouac is a lot like understanding everything else: you have got to see what was going on before him in the world of literature in order to try and see just why what he went and did wound up becoming as "phenomenal" as it did, and in my opinion the entire trick is that, before Kerouac, people generally (here in the western world) seem to have thought of books and writing as something you would only start doing if something 100% particular or important happened to you. Like, there was an idea that you had to actually have a point in order to write, or to at least have a very unique life, or else there was just no reason. Kerouac burnt this all to shreds: His writing to me ultimately has no moral, no theme, no plot, and never has . It's instead just a bunch of fairly well put together diary entries of him explaining to you how he went about getting fairly basic kicks and thrills. To Kerouac a day spent wandering around in the mall, driving around on the highway, and then stopping at the gas station and getting into a one hour conversation with the Indian clerk after buying lottery tickets & bogies would be considered a day well worth writing about. I don't think this is a bad thing of course, and in fact it's sometimes extraordinary.
And it's for this reason, actually, that I've often sat here and thought that, the sad truth is, if there's one place where Kerouacs inspiration ultimately wound up most of all, it's actually in places (or should I say websites?) like Facebook and livejournal and Wordpress and so forth. In a way I guess it's kind of ironic but for a long time now I've really felt it was true: if you want to see jacks influence, you're better off not buying any actual novels in my opinion, and instead just reading Facebook statuses, because that's really the only place where I think his spirit truly lives now. It sounds ridiculous but I think it's honestly the truth.
Mostly because novels in our own time have ultimately wound up sort of spinning back into that place where they were before Kerouac tried to mess around with them, except almost from an even more complicated angle: We are now back rather firmly with the idea that, if you're gonna write a novel, you better write about something BIG, and not just what you goof off doing in reality. Most accomplished writers from the past 30 years or so do not, it seems to me, write about literally anything even remotely in touch with their own reality oftentimes. All of our stories are very far off somewhere now, even that stories that do seem to be set in a sort of plain Kerouac type environment. Take this one movie I saw a few years ago for instance with Kate Winslet, which was set in New England and called, I believe, Labor Day.
The film was in a Kerouac environment (to my mind) because it was a very suburban , working class town that looked like the 50s, none of the characters had any super powers, I think the film might even open up in a grocery store ......and you almost think it's just going to be something normal, or realistic, but then of course, just like a modern post 70s story always does, a totally out of the ordinary detail enters in by way of the co star, who is a convict on the run and whom Kate Winslet has to hide et cetera et cetera.
Had the film been missing the convict element, and instead just been about Kate's character, say, hanging around in the house, lounging, reading, dancing to Ella Fitzgerald records, drinking some wine, smoking on her back porch, running with a dog, picking daisies, engaging in conversations with the neighbors and maybe staying up late every now & again .... everyone from our own time would have wondered "why the hell was this film made? This is an awful film!" But that's the whole catch with the old Kerouac novels you get it? That sort of thing is literally all they are. There are, generally speaking, no real antagonists in any of Jack's books, there is no place where the characters ultimately must wind up, there is no 'treasure' waiting specifically on page 320 rather than 150 or 40 and, from my point of view, there is generally not even any characters who need to be technically "saved".
In my opinion it's a win and a loss that this style of storytelling that Kerouac excelled at is now, in our own time, considered something no good by the general band of fuckers, I'm never quite sure what to make of it, I just know it's definitely true....
& I also of course know it's definitely true that Kerouacs influence is mostly on Facebook, as ridiculous as it sounds. Because on Facebook you log on and everyone is mostly just doing one of two things: Bragging about how awesome their completely stereotypical townie friends are, or bitching and moaning about how much they cant stand their life doing whatever it is that they do. Facebook status stories never have any real...point to them. They never go beyond 3-4 paragraphs. In some sense it is actually like all the Facebookers are just really excruciatingly bad Kerouac imitators. Their vocabulary sucks, they are of course, generally, lacking all of the mysticism, they don't have any ideas about the country as a whole , and they certainly can't write about music like Jack could (I do think he was exceptionally good at that 'bee bop' thing he used to do) but ... it still does not change the fact that they are all pulling from the same well because of the typicality.....
I don't know. I'm tired and am myself an horrific writer (because I always leave off the moment I get tired!) but I just thought I would write that about him because he really always does just make me feel so so young and I actually hate it because I'm not that young anymore and so it is not fun to experience him anymore, and is really more just heart breaking. He is youthful and it is annoying. My mind is no longer as romantic as that I now see, like it once was, and the one thing I actually find so miraculous about it is that somehow I managed to survive the youthful idealization period and make it out alive still an artist. And If you understand where I'm coming from with that I think you'll catch my drift. Like, a lot of people read young artists like Kerouac and I think they feel inspired through their youth to be an artist and write but then the second they age they no longer know what to scribble anymore. For me it seems to have been the opposite: I actually did not write all that much during my early 20s, but now that I'm in my later 20s , though the writing is frightfully disorganized, I still tend to write a lot and ....I don't know....I'm just surprised I guess......
Reading Kerouac of course beyond just making me nostalgic and sad also just makes me fucking hungry.----
I think when I go back to my massive and actually non existent garage (you're an imbecile if you actually believed that!) I'm not going to go back and get a Kerouac this time. I think I'm actually going to, like I always do when I start with one of jacks books, kick this sad heart breaking youthful thing as far as I can into the back of the garage....and then pick out something not nearly as fun or happy or INNOCENT but something that will instesd just be....what....??? I don't know.....
Just something that won't make me remember all my old now more or less despised amigos of yesteryear I guess. Something that will help me to instead imagine other scenes ...scenes far from small US towns and highway exits...people far from them, houses far from them....everything
Ah damn you Jack Kerouac you cheap trick bastard with your holy bullshit....
End
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